In many sectors, field representatives are used to educate customers and potential customers on the products of manufacturers and service providers. In the course of their duties, sales representatives make site visits and build a relationship with the customers and potential customers in their assigned territory. The field representative may wish to provide samples of his or her products to customers and potential customers. U.S. Published Application No. 2003-0088442 A1 describes a system that divide an inventory kept by a company (e.g., a pharmaceuticals company) so as to have a sub-inventory associated with a particular representative, yet the focus of this and other systems is sample-tracking as between the manufacturer and the representative; there are few tools to assist in the representative in conducting his or her duties. For example, in order to manage the samples allocated to a particular representative, the representative must have such samples with him or her during a site visit in order to distribute them.
Further, in some sectors, a representative may need to limit sample distribution in accordance with various laws, rules, or guidelines. In the pharmaceutical sector, for example, a given health care provider (HCP) may lack state or federal approvals to receive samples, due to expired or not-yet-granted licenses, historical sample distributions, or other reasons. One system described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,952,681 has real-time communications to control distributions to only authorized physicians, yet there are deficiencies in that system including reliance on communications to a central facility and no locally-generated mechanism to deter unauthorized sample acceptance.
The present invention provides software based tools that improve upon the software, systems, and methods available to representatives today.